​Have you heard of Elmo, saint or otherwise? I hadn’t until I got to Yale as a freshman in the fall of ’56. There I soon learned of the hoary institution’s fabled senior societies, where each club’s handful of senior-class members were sworn to lifelong secrecy. Word about the doings in these closeted spaces were not to be breathed, even to one’s roommate! The most famous one, of course, was “Bones,” that is Skull and Bones, whose august membership includes John Kerry and both Presidents Bush. St. Elmo’s was one of the less prestigious clubs along with Manuscript, where my Hungarian friend the late Dr. Pista Scher was a member as was the late Pennsylvania Senator Jack Heinz of the 57-varieties family...​

​As I write these words, it’s Hallowe’en 2023. In the trick-or-treat category, the world is being treated to two major wars: the continuing Russian invasion of Ukraine and the recent Israeli incursion into Palestinian Gaza. Ironically, Israel and Ukraine rank one and two in the world, respectively, in their percentage of Jewish-to-non-Jewish citizens. As a Jewish-Christian—I consider myself an Abrahamic since I’m technically also a Muslim—I am aghast at what Hamas did on October 7th over its border in Israel. I am equally aghast at what Israel is now doing in and to Gaza. But I also remember that the world’s most populous religion, originated in the name of the Prince of Peace, is no stranger to war. Think of the Crusades or of armed conflicts between brother Christians who happened to be Protestants versus Catholics. The term “holy war” has to be one of the world’s foremost oxymorons, right up there with “military intelligence.”...

​As I write, it’s October 31st. My 84th birthday is scheduled to arrive in six days, on November 6th. Inshallah, if God wills, as our Arab-speaking siblings say! Which brings me to the fact that I’m feeling, in the words of this retired English professor, pretty elegiac. Every fall, when the first cold weather arrives, as happened here last week, the top number of my blood pressure tends to rise significantly. (My 17 years in Hawai`i have obviously taken their toll.) Often, I also get sick around this time—not badly but always enough to get my attention. This year it was several days of pain in my lower abdomen plus chronic fatigue. Sounds like covid, right? My test, however, proved negative. Fortunately, both symptoms are now gone...

​I don’t know if this sort of thing happens to you. It never used to happen to me except in this last year, as I come within a month of my 84th birthday on November 6th. (Dear Reader, this particular blog will become available to you some weeks after that date.) So, picture this. I wake up in the morning at, say, 6 a.m., on most days a good hour before my alarm clock is scheduled to go off. Then I discover some strange, often unpleasant new pain or itch that wasn’t there the night before. Okay, so growing old, as the saying goes, is not for sissies. Still, it’s not so much this unwelcome new arrival that upsets me; it’s the fact that, unlike when you trip and cause your knee to bruise, bleed, and hurt, you have no idea what caused this latest arrival in your life to happen. In the case of an itch on the leg, was it a spider that lived between your sheets and decided for reasons of its own to bit you? Or what about when you put your house shoes on, and the top of your left little toe complains of a splitter-like pain? So you check the toe. Nothing! You run your finger up and down the inside top of your left slipper. Nothing! Good! So you return your left foot to the slipper, and there it is again. Ugh! You suffer a double hurt. First, there’s the physical pain. But then, even more painful in its way is the mystery of how this discomfort came to be and, despite your best effort to remedy it, it’s still there and refuses for some time to go away.

I don’t know if this sort of thing happens to you. It never used to happen to me except in this last year, as I come within a month of my 84th birthday on November 6th. (Dear Reader, this particular blog will become available to you some weeks after that date.) So, picture this. I wake up in the morning at, say, 6 a.m., on most days a good hour before my alarm clock is scheduled to go off. Then I discover some strange, often unpleasant new pain or itch that wasn’t there the night before. Okay, so growing old, as the saying goes, is not for sissies. Still, it’s not so much this unwelcome new arrival that upsets me; it’s the fact that, unlike when you trip and cause your knee to bruise, bleed, and hurt, you have no idea what caused this latest arrival in your life to happen...

​What a concept, right? The mere thought of it would give some red-blooded, red-state-dwelling Republicans apoplexy. Yet how do I know? Easy. The Bible tells me so. Take for example the Parable of the Day Laborers—my name for it—that Matthew recounts in the 20th Chapter of his Gospel, verses 1-16. (By the way, this passage was read on September 24, 2023, not only in our Episcopal churches but in Catholic and Lutheran ones around the United States that same Sunday. Talk about Ecumenism in action!) Anyway, in this story Jesus tells that the kingdom of heaven resembles a wealthy landowner who goes out to hire day laborers for his vineyard four times in the same day: at 9 a.m., noon, 3 pm, and 5 pm. At the end of the workday, he starts with the last set and ends with the first. Moreover, he gives all the workers the same full-day’s pay. Those who started in the morning and worked through the heat of the day were understandably incensed. Why should those who began their shift in the cool of the evening and worked a mere hour or two get the same pay as them. NO FAIR! In fact, the daylong laborers thought that if the last set got a full day’s pay, the owner would give them much more. Guess again! Knowing the thoughts of the full-day laborers, he said, “…I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous? So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

My younger daughter, Dr. Christine Feldman-Barrett, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, recently wrote the following message on her Facebook page: “Friends: Today is a much better day already. Thanks for all the love and cheer yesterday. Nothing like an early-morning stroll through the suburban pastoral to get into better spirits. Happy Friday, everyone!” She headed the post with the lovely photo you’ll see at the end of this blog...

​Well, to start with, I understand my people to be everybody, no exceptions. In fact, I am in accord with Indigenous Peoples like the North American Indians. When they say “All my relations” as they pass the pipe in a circle, they go beyond people to mean all the children of Mother Earth and Father Sky: the soil, the plants, the rivers, the oceans, the animals. I aim like them to make my family as wide and inclusive. Many U.S. citizens will use the term aliens in reference to undocumented migrants at our borders. I hope that otherworldly aliens are found to exist in my lifetime so that I can include them among my relations as well...

​I love things that work. And as for things that don’t, well let’s just say I’m less than enamored of them. To accentuate the positive, I’ll begin with some of the things in my life that have proved successful. At the top of the list are surgeries, whether medical or dental. My very first one took place when I was a little kid, near the end of World War Two. Like a lot of my peer group back then, I suffered from frequent swollen glands and attacks of tonsillitis. It wasn’t until I had my tonsils and adenoids out that that pain in the neck in all its varieties went and stayed away. My next operations were not until many decades later, the first two of which took place at a Kaiser Medical Center in downtown Honolulu...

​We all live in circles. They are our personal environments—what the Germans call our Sitz im Leben, our place in life. Therefore, our mission impossible, should we choose to accept it, is to expand those circles, from the smallest to the largest possible. In doing so we become more like our Creator...

​I pride myself on my talent for languages. I’ve studied at least twelve and can get around in eight. Not only that, but when it comes to English, I’m a published author with 12 books and have three degrees in English from Yale, the last a Ph.D. But today I spent the better part of an hour listening (and seeing on Zoom) a talk nominally in English by a fellow American native speaker that left me clueless...

​Although born into a secular Jewish family, I was exposed to Christian religious services since age 12, when I was sent to an American (Northern) Baptist boarding school in central New Jersey. At the Peddie School, as it was called in 1951, all of us boys—it was a boys boarding school at the time—were required to attend daily chapel. I liked the hymns but found the sermons boring. We Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, the student’s religion didn’t matter, also had to attend a Sunday church service in town until, in my senior year (1955-56), the Jewish parents complained, and a local rabbi was found to provide us Jewish boys with a weekday service, Sunday being just another weekday for Jews. Then, once a month there was a Sunday-morning convocation in our chapel, while every Sunday evening we had vespers there, something we boys referred to as “the Holy Hit Parade” because we could each ask for a favorite hymn during the 30-minutes period...

When I asked the new A.I.-powered Bing search engine what owls were, scientifically speaking, here’s some of what it spit out a second later: “Owls are birds from the order Strigiformes, which includes over 200 species of mostly solitary and nocturnal birds of prey typified by an upright stance, a large, broad head, binocular vision, binaural hearing, sharp talons, and feathers adapted for silent flight. . . .  They are known for their upright posture, significant, broad head, excellent vision and hearing, silent flight, camouflage, sharp talons, and hooked beak.” But when we ask what these unique birds are known for, world cultures have answered differently...

​One of the few lines of French poetry I know by heart is from Baudelaire (d. 1867): “Où sont les neiges d’antan?” (“Where are the snows of yesteryear?”) Indeed. One of the chief properties of snow is its short lifespan. There are exceptions, to be sure, as in arctic regions. But even that’s changing thanks to global warming. Here in temperate zones, the plow-constructed seemingly indestructible dirt-streaked mountains of the stuff in parking lots eventually trickle away in the warming days of spring...

​Now we’ve all heard of Rumi. That is, Jalal al-Din Muhammad, the Mevlana or Master (1207-1273), the Persian-born poet, scholar, and mystic. His Sufi order, or lineage, is known as the Medlevis, or more familiarly, the Whirling Dervishes. There is even a contemporary American offshoot called MOA, the Medlevi Order of America. I should know since a married couple, friends of mine in Hawaii, are leaders of the Order there and, yes, they can both whirl. Rumi, as he is commonly known, has had much of his written wisdom translated into English and no doubt into many other languages. His longest work is a 50,000-line poem, The Masnavi, considered “the Quran in Persian,” which instructs Sufis and others on how to come into the love of God. He got the name Rumi, by the way, from the place where he lived, worked, and died in southwestern Turkey. The city, Konya, was considered in its day the Rome of Turkey, in Turkish “Rum.”  Hence, as someone closely associated with that place, he became known as “Rumi,” literally “Roman.” Among his many famous sayings, one of my favorites is—“Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

​There are many good features in United HealthCare’s Medicare Select program that both Cedar, my wife, and I have. One that we have used for nearly 14 years is free membership in our local YMCA. (Actually, this feature enables us to use Y’s all over the country.) Apparently, the federal government’s research concluded that seniors on Medicare who work out regularly are less likely to cost the government money for medical treatment. That enabled the program to negotiate free memberships at health clubs nationally, the YMCA being one of them...

​These are questions I am supposed to write a one-page response to in my Episcopal Education for [Lay] Ministry course, a four-year program of 36 two-hour sessions. In all, we spend 288 hours creating in community a theological grounding for our faith. Two-thirds the way through Year 3, I’ll answer in this way. You, my blog readers (and classmates) will share with me what I have discovered.

Some 15 of us, part of the 40-person hikers’ retreat from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Boulder, Colorado, were standing or sitting around the entrance to the labyrinth. Mother Lucy, a retired priest in our diocese and now a member of our parish, was enlightening us on the history of labyrinths. Few of us knew that these mysterious circular pathways went back thousands of years, had been found all over the world, and whose origin was still to be discovered. By the time she had finished her presentation, it was nearly lunchtime. So most of our group left. My wife and I, however, stuck around, with me the first to enter the sacred circle.

​In summer 2017 Cedar and I walked 120 miles of the Camino in Spain. My intention at age 77 was to learn from Upstairs what my mission should be for my remaining life. Arriving at the Cathedral in Santiago, I looked up expectantly. A voice in my head said, “Actually, it’s none of your business.” I pouted. “Okay,” it relented. “We can tell you something. You know those yellow arrows that guide pilgrims along the Camino. We put something similar inside every human being. Unfortunately, not everyone can see or follow them. You have been blessed since you can see and mainly follow them. Therefore it would be wrong for us to tell you how to proceed. You need to discover that for yourself.”